Ascension Parish, LA

March, 2009

Preparing For The Storm

Hurricane Gustav hammered Ascension Parish in 2008. Parish leaders are using lessons learned from Gustav to get ready for the next possible storm.

We had several trees down. We had several mobile homes that were damaged and completely destroyed. A lot of rooftops came off. A variety, just trees down everywhere. We had just thousands and thousands of huge trees across the road, power lines.

We had close to 10 million dollars worth of damage in our parish. We worked very, very hard with FEMA during the recovery period. They were very good with commodities here in the parish.

They came on a regular basis. They worked with us when we did our contract for debris removal. Anytime we've called on them, they've been here and it's been a good experience with Ascension Parish. I don't know about other parishes, but we've had a great experience with FEMA.

We're going to build supply houses and then we're going to put all our commodities in there. We'll have at least one week's worth of commodities on hand, in the event a storm happens this year. So we're going to try to do that on an annual basis where we'll be ready.

I think if everyone would do that it would certainly take some of the pressure off FEMA getting the commodities here in the first 2 days.

Preparedness is the key. We can't depend on the state government, the federal government, the local government for everything. People have to heed the warnings and be prepared.